


Welcome Aboard, Mr Nimoy

by queenofroses12



Category: Star Trek: The Original Series
Genre: Actor meets character, Afterlife, Crew as Family, Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Real Life, Starship Enterprise (Star Trek)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-14
Updated: 2020-09-14
Packaged: 2021-03-07 01:47:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,561
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26465137
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/queenofroses12/pseuds/queenofroses12
Summary: Leonard Nimoy, in Afterlife, comes face to face with some people he knows very very well.  Kirk and crew have not ceased adventuring. Nimoy gets to find out in person what all the show and the movies got right. Not every thing he hears is to his liking.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 16





	Welcome Aboard, Mr Nimoy

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote the first draft some time ago, around Mr Nimoy's passing, and found it ridiculous. Threw it in a drawer, came across it a few days ago, thought I could brush it up to something decent. This is the result. Do let me know what you guys think.

You know what, dying can be pretty disorienting.

That’s my excuse for not recognizing where I had landed for one whole minute. I mean, it’s been a few long years, but still, you’d be expected to remember the place where it all started.

If you had asked me then, at that moment, I’d probably have said I was having one of those cliché life-flashing-before-your-eyes moment and my mind decided to execute the finale with the old set. I was in the Briefing Room of the Enterprise.

It took only a moment, though, to figure out this wasn’t our jury-rigged set. If you’ve seen the actual show (not the remastered versions), you’d know we had had to jury rig a lot – not quite on a shoestring budget, but close enough. Believe me, it was quite a work in improv (futuristic salt shakers converted to medical scanners, anyone?)

This one was no cardboard haven, though. It shone. Glowed. The metal of the table felt cool and hard to the touch under my hands. The silver grey walls would feel the same, I knew instinctively. The viewscreen covered an entire wall – it was dark now, but could flare to life in a touch.

But those details I took in only later – what hit first was that Bill and Dee were there, seated at the Briefing Table, eyes fixed on me.. Dee, of course, I’d have expected, if I expected anything to follow death. But Bill was alive and kicking, last time I checked…

“Welcome aboard” Bill said, smiling.

It was that patented Kirk-smile. Cool, charismatic Starship-captain-who-could-charm-the-pants-off-a-Romulan smile. Wait a second – the uniforms… That settled it.This wasn’t just a flashback.

His uniform was actual gold shade, not the stupid green we used – that one showed up as gold on screen. But that wasn’t the only change. It was like one of those kids' exercises - spot the differences. The face was the same, more or less. The hair...A brighter gold than Bill's, somewhat tousled. The eyes? Hazel eyes, yes, but the look in them was different. The look I've seen Bill wear only in his best acting moments (And there weren't as many of those as he liked to think..). Not an actor putting on his Starship Captain Alter-ego for an hour. The eyes of a man whose day-job it was to go where no man has gone before. Not to mention the toned, tried fitness. Bill never managed to make the uniform look this good. These muscles had been earned with military training.

“Uh…Captain Kirk?” (I'd like to say I kept my poise as my own alter-ego would have done, but let's go with Honesty Is The Best Policy this time).

Instinctively, my hands went to my ears. Nope, not pointed. And I wasn’t in uniform, or in any Vulcan robe. Just a sweatshirt and pants. Casual Friday? Dee…McCoy…snorted, clearly aware where my mind had gone.

“Nope, you ain’t playing the hobgoblin this time.”

“ It’s an honor to meet you, Mr Nimoy”

I whirled. Those clipped, precise tones were instantly recognizable. Mr Spock stood beside me. Mr Spock. The real deal. Like Kirk, there were changes - naturally, more than there was between Bill and Kirk.

Figures. After all, I’m no Vulcan. We got the basics right, at least. Pointy ears, bad bowl hair cut (yep, for any fangirls listening in, it did look more glossy and silky than ever), serene face, an eyebrow elegantly raised in response to the illogical emotional waves pouring off the guy who played him.

But there was an...alienness about him. I had tried to capture that, to play him as way more than just a pointy-eared human, but hey, I am human. There's only so much you can do for authenticity. His skintone was lighter than mine,to begin with. There was a slight greenish undertone, enough to know that the veins beneath it carried a green liquid, not red –way more natural and dignified looking than the result of our hours-long make up sessions.

His eyes weren’t my deep brown, but a darker, almost-but-not-quite-black shade – not a shade you found on earth. But more than that, in his tones, in the way he stood (so still, so real), in the aura of tightly leashed but very present power, you got an impression that this was someone whose ancestors had spawned in a different ocean, who had been born and raised under the light of a different star, whose mind operated on a completely different but somehow compatible frequency. I'd always thought I had done a good job playing an alien, but as the old ads say, there's no way to beat the real thing.

I finally managed to stop gaping at him. (Very illogical, Leonard- not to mention rude.)“I am…dead, right?”

“Uh, afraid so” Kirk said. I got the idea he was watching me for any sign of panic. There wasn’t any, not because I had Spock’s stoicism, but because, well, it wasn’t exactly sudden, you know.

“It took my guy a lot longer to catch on” McCoy commented.

“Naturally, doctor.”

“Naturally? What’s that supposed to mean?” The doctor got a did-he-just-insult-me look on his face.

“Mr Nimoy is an author and director as well as an actor. Naturally, his imagination and thought processes would be better equipped to reach the right conclusion than Mr Kelley’s. No disparagement of your mental faculties was intended.”

“You two, play nice” Kirk suggested” We’ve got a visitor aboard.”

I took a good long look around, trying to take everything in. There was a lot of equipment around, display units and computers and stuff, the parts we hadn’t had the budget to make. To be honest, not many of them looked like the counterparts we had the prop guys make up. In other words, no glorified tape recorders doing double duty as a super-futuristic-record-reading-thing. The three of them waited in silence, letting me get my wits in order.

“Afterlife?”

“A part of it” Spock said, in his (my?) lecture tone. “What you describe as the afterlife is composed of diverse planes of existence. This is our afterlife. For you, this is only an interlude before you move on to your designated dimension.”

“Meaning, take a good look around while you got the chance." McCoy interrupted. "Whoever’s up there running the show likes to give the actors and some of the writers a chance to meet us before they move on.”

Wow.“Goes to reason this is your idea of heaven…”

“It’s not heaven and hell” Kirk interrupted. “I think that comes after. If we die here. Or maybe that just leads to another dimension, who knows. “

“If you die here?” I frowned

“We don’t age, but death is a possibility. Accidents, battles, illness…Of course, there is the option to lead a safer life. Those who stay planetside can practically live forever. Only…”

“You guys chose to explore.” Naturally. It's James Kirk and his crew you're talking about.

“What else?" Kirk grinned "It’s like a dream come true. Out here, among the stars…Forever. With my crew.”

“The others are here, too.” McCoy added. “Uhura, Sulu, Chekov, all the crew, as we were during the first mission. All decided they wanted to be aboard.”

“Even the doctor” Spock sounded as if that choice did puzzle him a little.

“Well, someone’s got to be around to patch up the pair of you” McCoy grumbled, glaring at his frenemy.

The weirdness of the situation was only just beginning to sink in.“My. God.”

Well, what else can you say? Kirk grinned.

“By the way, it isn’t just us who’re here. In this dimension, I mean. Picard, Jeanway..

” “All the Enterprises?” He nodded.

“And other worlds. The term we use for this dimension is Valhalla”

“The place for the heroes.” I murmured. It fit, after all.

“That would be somewhat inaccurate” Spock said (It was seriously weird hearing my own voice come from someone else).”The denizens of this dimension are not merely those who are normally considered ‘heroes’. A more accurate definition would be all whose stories have been told-“

“And loved” Jim added, with a wink. The vulcan glanced at his captain with his oh-you-illogical-humans look, then continued.

"The Multiverse, as it has been termed, is more complex than most theories have dared speculate. The Koneshnare Paradox-"

"Spock, the guy just _acted_ your role, 'kay? Cut back on the technobabble."

"In simple terms - the so called fantasy and science fiction writers are those whose latent ESP potential allows them to see into other dimensions, and channel real events of an alien dimension as fiction, consciously or, as is more usual, unconsciously."

Okay…This was getting weirder by the minute. 

“Afraid you can’t go off to have a chat with Harry Potter, though” McCoy cut in before I could say anything. “You’re sorta on a limited visa.”

  
“You can look around here aboard as much as you want to,” Kirk said “but those who belong to other worlds are off limits.”

There were a thousand questions I wanted to ask, but there was a problem with coherency - there's only so much a human mind (even a dead one) can take at a time. It's one thing coming face to face with characters you have created - I've long felt that they had all begun to take on a life of their own. But to be told they were real people, living people, denizens of another dimension, but real enough, whose lives you copied into a TV show...

“ Take your time. It’s mostly quiet here right now." Kirk said "Would be a while before Thanos and team got up to anything else. We hit them hard enough to keep them a while.”

“Thanos as in…”

“Infinity War. Yep.”

“Yeah. Sure. Why not?”

Where do you begin, when you see your characters face to face? “Did we get everything right? About you guys, I mean? The show and the movies?”

The trio exchanged glances.

“The show was mostly spot on.” Kirk said at last.

“Spot on?” McCoy demanded, indignant. Spock’s raised eyebrow was challenge enough. Kirk shrugged.

“Oh, come on, Bones! It was 1960s! They didn’t have the special effects stuff to show the kind of things we ran into.” He looked kindly at me. “You guys did great, with the stuff you had. good enough approximations, most of the time.”

“So I take it there were changes?”

“Of course.” He paused as if not sure where to begin. “The Psi 2000 Incident…What was the episode title?”

It had been a long time ago, but I remembered every title well enough. “The Naked Time.”

“Oh yeah, that one. You got most everything correct, except the beginning, with poor Tormolin.”

“Surely, it was a most illogical premise? A trained starship officer, intelligent and balanced enough to qualify for a deep space mission, being so incompetent as to take of protective clothing planetside? Especially under circumstances which suggested some form of contamination?"

Actually, the guy playing the unfortunate engineer had raised the same objection, but hey, we had a show to run. "So how did it happen?"

“Defective suit.” Kirk said, shrugging. “The quartermaster department made a serious error. It went unnoticed too long. Heads rolled over that one, I can tell you!”

“Well, we had only forty five minutes to work with."

"That one wasn't too bad" McCoy commented. “But _that_ one…The one with the brain surgery…”

I grimaced. To be honest, that was one of the episodes I genuinely tried to forget I had acted in.

“That didn’t happen, right?”

“ The basic premise, yes." Spock replied, some what to my shock . “ However, not in the way you depicted it" Thank Heavens. "It was my mental patterns -Katra -that was stolen, not the physical cerebral tissue. And they did not take my body down to the planet. It was kept in the sickbay, on life support.”

“Should’ve got Scotty to make one of those zombie helmets, though” Bones put in. “Would’ve been fun to hold a puppet show.”

“Bones.”

Kirk’s tone was indulgent enough, but there was a sharpness in it that even the doctor detected. The captain had tried to forget those events too, though not for the same reasons as I did, naturally.

“And the Deneva incident. Your novelization got that right.”

“Your brother and family wasn't involved?" Kirk winced almost imperceptibly.

"Um, no" McCoy stepped in. "The method of destroying those blasted things, that the novel got right."

"Followed it to the Hive Queen?"

“Yeah. Because anyway, how can light destroy a creature lodged inside your body?”

He had a point there. "Well, there was the problem with special effects. And the problem with explaining how you guys would know where to look."

"Well, one of those things got itself coiled around a touch telepath's nervous system, so I'd say it should be pretty obvious how we tracked it."

"There was still the issue with the special effects."

"Point taken. Well, anyway, the show was mostly reasonable."

“The movies?”

Kirk grimaced.

“Sorry, but that…Well, good enough fiction, yeah, but that’s…really not how it all went down." He paused. "I sort of wish it was, but no. Only one of the movies was even mostly accurate."

“Which one? Not the first, I hope?” Kirk chuckled.

“God, no. that was practically a bigger and badder Nomad, wasn’t it?”

Um, he had a point there…

”I do not intend to be rude, but frankly, the plot of that film was riddled with inaccuracies and illogical reactions."

"The Starfleet Brass appointing Jim Admiral? Straight from Captain to Admiral, at thirty six?" McCoy shook his head in mock horror. "They would've had a collective stroke at the very idea. No way they were going to take him off the Bridge."

"Not to mention I definitely had no intention of giving up my ship." Kirk added. "No way, thank you very much. As for the Kolinhar..."

Spock took over the explanation.

"My undergoing Kolinhar would have been a most unlikely and illogical turn of events."

"Believe me, I tried to get Roddenbury to back off. Nah. Said it added depth of character."

McCoy snorted. Spock ignored him.

" There were several reasons why it would have been impossible. To begin with, someone with an active T'h'yla bond cannot undergo the discipline unless his bondmate does the same."

Yay! So the T'h'yla deal was right! I knew it!

"Secondly, even had I desired to undergo Kolinhar, I would not have done so while my mother lived. She would have seen it as a rejection of my human half. In effect, rejecting her. It would have been unforgivable to cause her that pain."

Even Vulcan scientists love their mamas! Yay again!

"Also, such a path was not for me. The very qualities that assisted me to gain my position in Starfleet and the galactic scientific community, would have prevented the submission to the rituals of Kolinhar. Both worthy paths, but mutually exclusive."

"So that's another change out of the window."

"So to speak."

"As for the doctor resigning his commission - unfortunately, that did not transpire either."

That got the good doctor flaring up again.

“Unfortunately! Now wait one damn minute, you-“

“Um, which movie did we get right?” I interrupted before the doctor could build up steam. The problem was, I was beginning to get a very uncomfortable feeling that I didn't want an answer to that question.

“The second one.”

Kirk smiled as he spoke, but the look in his eyes made clear that, even here, those memories hurt. I froze for a moment.

"There were changes, of course. To begin with, I was still of captain rank at the time."

"And Spock certainly wasn't" McCoy chimed in. "Can you imagine the hobgoblin as a teacher? A shipful of cadets at his mercy! Those poor kids would've had mass nervous breakdowns within the first week!"

"Going by Chekov and Saavik, Spock would have been an excellent mentor" Kirk interrupted, shooting a glare at the doctor. "Anyway, it was during our second five year mission. Near the end of it. Saavik had just joined the ship, though. A replacement navigator. She came aboard a couple of days before the trouble started. Speak of timing!"

"She performed in a perfectly satisfactory manner."

"That's vulcan for 'the kid did great', by the way" McCoy translated.

"Doctor..."

"These were the only changes?" I glanced at Spock. There was one change I wanted to check on.“Um…So..You..And if the third movie never happened…”

“I did not rejoin the crew till we met again here, Mr Nimoy.” His tone was bland as ever. He could have been discussing the weather for all the emotion he showed. “In the final meld with the doctor, I merely left him a message for the captain, in case I did not survive long enough to bid him farewell. The kind of Katra transfer you depicted…" he looked as disturbed as a Vulcan could "That is highly unethical. No Vulcan would have done that to anyone, forget a...friend. The strain of carrying a katra is not one that non-telepathic minds can tolerate, especially when forced upon them with no preparation as the film depicted. It would have been too risky."

“So your..katra?”

“Surely, Mr Nimoy, considering the importance of the Katra transfer in Vulcan culture, it is obvious that a method would be available to cover the eventuality of sudden deaths?”

“Um, you mean..”

“For any Vulcan who ventures off-world for any considerable extent of time, it is customary to form a special mental link to one of the Masters of Gol. Those whom you call priests and priestesses. It holds double importance in the case of those whose lifestyle puts them at more than usual risk of unexpected death. All Vulcans venturing into deep space form such a link before they leave. At the moment of death, no matter how far the dying individual is from Vulcan, the katra would seek and find the priest to whom his mind is linked."

McCoy’s former outburst had flared down at the memory.

“You know, Spock, I sort of wish you did do it.”

Spock looked unsure of how to answer that. Kirk smiled half sadly, half fondly. 

“That was a rough time. The… funeral… was not among the stars, by the way. We took him back to Vulcan.”

This was hurting him, I knew. Hurting him even when he had them all back. I needed to change the subject, but frankly, I was still trying to process what I had heard. Spock had actually died that day. No reset button. No genesis cure. None of the other four movies.

"After that some of the changes you presented for that first film did come about. I got promoted to Admiral rank."

I had a feeling that the only reason Kirk had accepted the promotion, accepted the ground posting that came with it, was because he couldn’t handle the idea of going back to the stars without Spock at his side. He had declared he'd never let them take his ship from him, but maybe it no longer felt like his ship without his first officer.

“Bones retired from deep-space.”

“I was getting too old for this stuff, anyway.” The doctor put in. “Got a nice, safe posting at the Command Base.”

Near Jim. Where he could get to his friend when he needed him. And vice versa. I had the idea that the two had needed each other a lot those first few..months? Years?

“Technically, doctor” Spock put in “You were not too old. As we do not age while in space-“

“Wait, what?”

Kirk, really glad of the subject change, launched into an explanation.

“Anti-aging medication. Every one aboard gets it. we have to. Once a body gets past forty thereabouts, it can’t stand the strain of constant warpspeed travel. All starship personnel undergo extensive treatments – everyone stops aging at an age between twenty two and thirty. Bones joined the Fleet a bit older than the usual recruits – he was forty. The outermost limit. Still, he never got older than that. One of the perks of going deep-space. Doesn’t extend the lifespan, though. Just halts aging.”

We could have done that, maybe, on the show. Just didn’t occur. Just as well – we’d never have been able to shoot the movies. The movies which, except for the most heartbreaking of them all, never happened.

To be honest, I had felt some of the last movies were…a bit too goofy, a bit too improbable. But right now, for all their goofiness, I’d have them back if I could. Because I had seen the look in Kirk’s eyes as he spoke about that time. We had initially intended Spock’s death to be permanent. Looks like that intention came real here. Damn it. But that was over. They were here, they were together, aboard the silver ship. Speaking of…

“Captain?” the intercom called, in a scottish burr. “Ye mentioned somethin’ about a guided tour?”

Kirk grinned, the shadow of memories slipping off his face. This was something he loved – a chance to show off his silver lady. The world whose echo, shadow, we had crafted.

“Aye, Scotty. We’re about to start. Right, Mr Nimoy?” I nodded. “Now…Where shall we start?”


End file.
